


Reach Through

by trascendenza



Category: Mirrormask (2005)
Genre: Community: smallfandomfest, F/F, POV Female Character, doppelshipping, layers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-01
Updated: 2007-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-04 05:58:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mirrors don't reveal everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reach Through

**Author's Note:**

> Written for round 1 of smallfandomfest, prompt: unmirroring.

Kevin shifted on his feet, looking like he expected her to say something. Her arms were crossed over her chest, unyielding.

The driver honked.

"All right, then!" He yelled over his shoulder.

He kissed her on the cheek and smiled sheepishly. She thought, uncharitably, that the smile looked better when he'd had a mask for a face. Sixth months and she still hadn't grown accustomed to the shape that was in front of her right now.

That said it all, really.

She sighed heavily; he got on the bus. When he looked back, all he saw was the back of her.

"Don't know why I thought he'd stick around," Helena mumbled as she walked away, without even a parting glance.

*

"About time you realized you could do better than him," her reflection said snappishly one day.

She dropped her pencil at the unexpected sound of her own voice, slightly modulated to a higher pitch, and stared in the mirror for a good twenty minutes. Even after a series of goofy faces, askance looks and a few pokes at the surface, nothing else happened.

But when she went to pick up her pencil again, she found the self-portrait she'd been sketching smiling back at her.

It was very good, really—since the incidents last year, she'd found herself drawing as easily as breathing. The mouth was quirked at just the right angle, teasing, and a little more mature than was strictly appropriate. It was work of which she should be proud.

Except she hadn't drawn on a mouth.

*

On her eighteenth birthday, she woke up with a charcoal pencil in her hand.

Holding out her arm, she started when she saw her own handwriting on it.

_I'm lonely, now. Aren't you? Come and see me some time._

She blushed when she had to open her shirt to read the last part of it.

*

"All right." Helena sat in front of the mirror, running her hand through her hair so it stood as puffed black spikes and squaring her shoulders. "Either I'm going mad—" she scowled, somewhat displeased with that notion, "or, well. _You_ tell me."

The image in the mirror shifted with a waver of heat shimmering the air, and then the Princess was on the other side, bedecked in her spider-silk black dress and garish make up.

Helena had never felt so relieved to see her own—or, well _a_ reflection.

"Aren't you _bored_?"

Helena would recognize that spoiled tone anywhere.

"Bored? You're bored? All this—" Helena held up the grinning self-portrait, "you did all this because you were _bored_?"

The princess, chewing gum, blew a bubble and popped it. "Why else?" She said, tilting her head like Helena was a bit funny in the head.

Helena couldn't explain the sudden disappointment that choked her throat.

"Get stuffed," she said, turning the mirror around and throwing herself onto her bed.

*

The mirror stayed turned against the wall, and her charcoal pens were safely locked in her nightstand, but she couldn't stop herself from dreaming.

_Books were flying through the air, flapping their pages and narrowly evading a collision course with her face._

_She grabbed one at random, but the pages were blank. She was about to drop it, but ink stains started spreading across the paper until it formed into a face, pale and eyes rimmed with kohl._

_"Hang on, I'm coming out," the papers ruffled, and the princess began to squirm out of the book. Helena held it arm's length, wanting to throw it away, but too afraid._

_The princess tamped the last of herself out of the book, and put her hands on her hips._

_"What did I ever do to you?" The princess asked, narrowing the eyes that Helena would have admitted were beautiful if she hadn't though it too conceited. "I just wanted to talk a little."_

_Helena was indignant. "You stole my life!"_

_The princess waved her hand. "Nothing personal, love. You've seen what mother's like."_

_Helena shrugged. "Just because you have a rotten mother doesn't mean you can go and steal mine."_

_The princess seemed to shrink in on herself a bit, biting her ruby-painted bottom lip. "I'll never leave again now, thanks to you."_

_"You want me to feel guilty?" Helena scoffed._

_And for the first time, the princess looked contrite. "No. I just wanted to talk to you. You're the only one who understands."_

_"I—" Helena started reaching out, but the book swallowed the princess up again, and she disappeared with the clapping shut of cover to end._

*

Weeks of trying later, and she discovered that the mirror and the drawing were both dead ends.

It was the window of her room that finally caught her eye, a prism glinting in the sunlight where her father had hung it when they'd first moved in here. To bring a little color into her room, he'd said, and she'd given him a hug.

The rainbow skittered across her skin and came to rest just below her collarbone; it felt like a finger stroking downward, saying _come closer_.

She put her hand against the pane, warm from the afternoon, but when she looked out, she didn't see the crowded city or a blue sky. She saw herself, and then she saw herself become someone else, someone who—even as much as she hated the way she looked when she dared a glance at a mirror—was beautiful in a way that only the two of them would ever know.

"Would you like to come for a visit?" She asked shyly, the lights dancing across her body, ghost touches that warmed her from head to foot. She hadn't felt this alive in months, not since she'd been flying on books and running from an evil queen.

"What, you trust me, now?" The princess asked, but she was laughing, and her image became nearly solid, close enough to touch.

"Only one way to find out," Helena said, taking a deep breath.

She reached her hand through.


End file.
